Sessions

Presented by Julius Haukkasalo in Congress Hall.

Going from co-founding a digital agency in a tiny suburban garage to running a company of 30 people has taught me things – many of which I’ve learned from my own failures. I’d like to present the 5 biggest mistakes of my entrepreneurial life so far to hopefully help others learn from those f*ckups.

Presented by Thomas Audunhus in Congress Hall.

What if you could build sites that load instantly, without using cache?

In my work at the performance-focused WordPress host Servebolt, I come across a variety of developers, from those who build sites using themes to those who build sites from scratch. The majority, regardless of skillset, have the same issue. They build sites that are cache dependant in one way or another.

To build cache dependant sites is something many have learned they have to because close to all hosting companies are saying so. Some hosting companies even force you to use caching. The truth is that, unless you pay by CPU time, the only one really benefiting from you building cache dependant sites is your hosting company.

In this talk, I will give you my arguments to why you should stop being cache dependant, and why that will make you into a much better developer. In-between the arguments I will give you some tips and tricks few others talk about, but that are proven to make your sites faster.

Presented by Laura Hinkkanen in Congress Hall.

Laura talks about content design as part of the design process:

• Why and when you need a content designer
• What content a designer brings to the design process
• What are the benefits for the client/team/product

Since the content design is still a bit rare or a new thing in Finland and the Nordics, she’s also going to talk about what is needed to become a content designer and how content is and can be part of agile development.

Presented by Bjørn Johansen in Sirkus.

Parallel independent feature development, quick iterations, and fast-paced environments within growing teams can be managed smoothly. There is no need to wait for a version release to push out that small bugfix or feature upgrade. You can even throw automated quality assurance, atomic deployments and make sure your entire team runs the exact same version of every included package, plugin, and theme that runs in the live environment as they are mimicking locally.

Presented by Jaakko Alajoki in Sirkus.

Data centers in the U.S. use more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That requires roughly 34 giant coal-powered plants. What can a single developer do to make more energy efficient code? I will go through a series of not-so-serious experiments showing how various implementations made with Raspberry PI web server and power meter affect power consumption. How much energy does enabling WordPress caching save? What about optimizing queries? I will tell.

Presented by Jenny Wong in Sirkus.

At the State of the Word, it was announced that one of the upcoming focuses of the WordPress project is raising the minimum version requirement of PHP.

WordPress core is already PHP7.2 compatible but are your plugins and themes?

In this talk, Jenny will be looking at the steps needed to check if plugins and themes are compatible, and the lessons learned from doing the steps.

Are you PHPrepared?

Presented by Antonio Villegas in Congress Hall.

The new WordPress block editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) is a radical change for developers used to working with PHP. If you needed to learn JavaScript deeply and quickly to update your plugins and keep everything working, you may still feel a bit overwhelmed. The development of blocks represents a major challenge for all of us not proficient in JavaScript. In this talk we will show you a set of good practices to follow when developing with Gutenberg, as well as typical mistakes that you should avoid so that your code doesn’t break anything.

Presented by Marco Fernandes, Thor Andre Gretland in Congress Hall.

In 2017 we fell in love with Gutenberg. In 2018 we decided to use it as a foundation for all things CMS: WP, Drupal or standalone apps. This resulted in Gutenberg JS: https://github.com/front/gutenberg-js. We quickly found out that the universal concept of blocks deserves a CMS agnostic library, and what if we could make it cloud based?

Here is what we did, what we learned, and how we are using it today!

Presented by Thomas Hurd in Sirkus.

In 2017 Thomas spoke about how to plan a multilingual design site properly based on User Experience principles and some common sense (that perhaps wasn’t so common). This time around, he will show you how to setup a best practice multilingual site using WordPress. During his talk he will cover design, content, technical, and SEO considerations, among others.

Presented by Otto Kekäläinen in Congress Hall.

Sometimes the bad guys get in, despite all the protections and precautions. If that happens, there are many techniques that can be used to stop further damage, track down what the intruder did and how they got in. Finally the site needs to be cleaned up and re-opened for visitors. In this talk the most important techniques are presented along with real-life examples when they were used.

Presented by Kristoffe Biglete in Sirkus.

Mobile first! Yes, but how?

In a heavily optimised marketing environment, the one room where growth is still a work-in-progress is mobile.

In this presentation, I will showcase how we leveraged the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) framework by Google, to increase our mobile traffic and help our business grow.

I will show how we integrated WordPress with AMP, the advantages and disadvantages, and how to start building an AMP template yourself.

Presented by Allan Halme in Sirkus.

A case-study presentation of the design and implementation of a custom WooCommerce site that integrates and synchronizes all product information in three languages from an external Product Information Management system.

Presented by Andrey Savchenko in Congress Hall.

WordPress commitment to backwards compatibility spawned an extensive code base with rich functionality. Much of it has now seen many years of very active use by developers.

The history of it is fascinating to study and learn from. It teaches us principles of code that see sustained and productive use. As well as challenges of code that fell short and became an endless challenge.

This talk will walk through the results of the poll on developer experience with the core code. And distill them into practical lessons on code design for success.

The audience will get an overview of the best (and worst) parts of code in WordPress core. Followed by a practical summary of their traits and challenges.

Presented by Christian Nikkanen in Sirkus.

We built a React single page application for one of the largest Finnish technology magazines. It replaced their old traditional WordPress site at the end of 2018.

The application has been in development for over a year now. It’s time to share our experiences building it, talk about why we built it, and how we built it. Because there were a lot of problems, I’ll talk about how we resolved them.

To name a few: authenticating users to WordPress, social media previews, search engine visibility, integration testing, and last but not least, cache invalidation in all parts of the stack.

Everyone in the audience should be able to grasp the main points, but developers will get most out of the talk.

Presented by Francesca Marano in Sirkus.

The Italian WordPress community was dormant for years, until a bunch of people got together at WCEU Contributor Day in Seville, in 2015, and decided it was time to revive it.

After months of online chats in our Slack team, we organised an event that kick-started an avalanche of Meetups and WordCamps in Italy: a stand-alone Contributor Day.

Four years later, Italy has more than 30 active Meetups, 6 cities with WordCamps in planning stages, and a great number of Contributors across the project.

In this talk, I’ll go through the steps we took to organise it and I will also talk about Contributor Nights, special Meetup events where we concentrate on one of the Make teams and learn how to contribute from scratch.

Presented by Dominik Schilling in Sirkus.

Over 52% of all WordPress installs are using a locale which is not American English. In this talk we’ll check how this is made possible. We’ll also learn more about tools and helpers that enables easy localisation of WordPress plugins and themes, whether they are public or private.

The new block editor (Gutenberg), not only changed our editing flow but also finally improved the way how internationalization is handled in JavaScript. Not sure how? Join this talk to prepare yourself for WordPress internationalization in 2019.

Presented by Taeke Reijenga in Congress Hall.

This talk looks at the business side of web accessibility. Awareness around accessibility and inclusivity is increasing in the WordPress ecosystem but how can you as a designer, developer, or agency (owner) get the message across to your client? As makers of the web we often have to deal with myths like ‘accessible web design is ugly or boring’, ‘web accessibility is expensive and hard to implement’ and ‘my site audience does not include disabled people’. This talk looks at the WHY of Web Accessibility and provides the audience with HOW. HOW to convince your client that there are many benefits with having an accessible website.

Presented by Elisa Heikura in Congress Hall.

So you’re a splendid developer or designer, you bring your A game to work every day. You sleep like a log and jog like a fox and you’re practically unstoppable. Until feedback from your boss, colleague, or a customer comes into your inbox and all of a sudden, you’re this fiery ball of anger, resentment, and curse words. What just happened? How can you learn to receive feedback like a Buddhist unicorn, and how can you even benefit from it?

Presented by Jonathan Sulo in Sirkus.

Do you want a WordPress site which is as slow as possible? Then check out these awful plugins which drain your performance and kill your database! Or check out the better alternatives, with some general usage and error checking tips for WordPress plugins.

Presented by Piccia Neri in Congress Hall.

Think that the UX process is only for big agencies with big clients and big budgets? Think again! UX research and methodology can, and even must, be part of any web project, no matter the size. It’s possible, and I’ll show you how. In fact, you’re probably doing UX research already in some form, and you don’t even know it.

This talk demystifies UX and shows you how to make it an integral part of your web design process. The improvement is guaranteed: for you, your clients, and your clients’ clients.

Presented by Felix Arntz in Congress Hall.

A diverse environment like your WordPress site is inherently difficult to control. If you are a developer, you can make sure your own code meets quality standards and honors best practices, but it is usually not possible to do the same for plugins created by others. It becomes even more of a problem if you are required to rely on third-party code entirely, for example when you maintain a WordPress site, but don’t write extensions for it yourself.

Recently, new browser technologies have been introduced to help tackle such issues. Content Security Policies and Feature Policies allow you to define contracts between your site and the browser, efficiently enforcing your site to stick to certain best practices you define. You don’t want your site to ever serve images that are too large? You don’t want your site to ever give the user that pop-up for browser notifications? These new policies put you in control over how your site interacts with the user, relying on the browser as a middle man. If there is a violation of the policies you have defined, the browser can inform you via a new Reporting API standard, allowing you to spot the problem and act upon it. This session will provide an introduction to these new technologies, and then dive into how you can use them in WordPress.

Presented by Rian Rietveld in Sirkus.

WAI-ARIA means Accessible Rich Internet Applications. These are attributes you add to your HTML5 to (for example) inform blind visitors what is happening on your site.

How do you use ARIA and why? And why is the first rule of ARIA: “Don’t use ARIA”?

In this talk Rian will show you how to

• announce changes and error messages
• use the JavaScript function wp.a11y.speak()
• tell if a menu or accordion is closed or open
• give feedback on what’s happening on a one page website
• get the right documentation and examples

Discover that ARIA isn’t that complicated and is very useful for those visitors that use your site in another way than you do.

Presented by Sarah Semark in Sirkus.

How do you teach a computer to design a website?

I’ve spent the last year trying to automate my own job. I’ll tell you why that’s not such a bad thing, and how to actually go about doing it.

We’ll investigate how automation isn’t all that different from other technological leaps of the past—as well as ways in which it is vastly different. We’ll touch on how emerging technologies can be an equaliser and the real-world application of machine learning.

Along the way, we’ll talk about ethics, universal basic income, and how soon Judgement Day will be upon us.

Finally, we’ll touch on how Gutenberg opens up new possibilities within the WordPress space, and how to take advantage of those opportunities.

Presented by Monica Solheim Slind, Magne Ilsaas in Congress Hall.

The Norwegian Government Security and Service Organisation facilitates and runs over 75 WordPress sites on behalf of all the ministries, and have a long history with WordPress. It started out with themebuilder and a standard theme, but as the platform grew, it became nearly impossible to maintain and support due to all the possibilities and variations. The internal team spent most of their time supporting what was already there, and had little time for innovation and optimisations.

Together with Dekode, they have now rebuilt the platform, and made their own modular custom theme, with a flexible but common design system in place. This allows them to spin up new, complex sites within days instead of weeks, freeing up both capacity and resources to further develop the platform, and to better serve their clients.

The platform has been designed for scale from the start and all further development contributes to the platform as a whole.

This talk will cover both sides of the story. From within G.S.S.O, and how it has changed the way they work with, and deliver WordPress. How a project like this is a partnership with a large dose of mutual trust. How a design and code system can save a lot of time and money. And last but not least, how this way of working is a lot more fun for everyone involved.